March 4: ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY
ON THIS DAY IN 1870, a Brooklyn Daily Eagle editorial said, “The death of [John] LaMountain, the celebrated aeronaut, calls attention to the small progress, it might almost be said no progress, made in many years toward the solution of the problem of air-navigation. Time, money and patient faith hardly less than heroic have been devoted to the subject, and yet no substantial advance has been made since the first balloon ascended. That initial balloon was at the mercy of the wind, and so is the last one that went up. The balloonist has learned to regulate his rise and fall by ballast and ingenious valves, but he is quite as unable as ever to control his movements in any other direction. The breeze blows as it listeth and the aeronaut must go with it, whether it carries him to the place he would reach or among undesirable mountains or above the dangerous ocean. The difficulty he encounters seems inherent and insurmountable. Nothing heavier than the air can rise above the earth. Nothing lighter than the air can resist it when it gathers the force of a gale. The ingenious builders of flying machines have done everything except get the better of this difficulty, against which all their labor is thus far fruitless.”
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ON THIS DAY IN 1928, the Eagle reported, “The arrival in London of the Wright brothers’ biplane in which Orville Wright made the first flight in a heavier-than-air machine off the sand dunes of Kill Devil Hill, Kitty Hawk, N.C., recalls the details of one of the bitterest disputes in the annals on invention. The decision of Orville Wright to take the plane ‘where it will receive proper recognition’ removes from the country one of its most valuable relics just 25 years after the odd contraption brought world renown to the two bicycle repair men of Dayton, Ohio, generally credited with being the fathers of mechanical flight. For it was on the 17th of December, 1903 that Orville Wright flew over the sands on the Carolina coast the plane he and his elder brother, Wilbur, who died of typhoid fever in 1912, had built. The plane only rose to a height of 10 feet and traveled 120 feet before it came to rest in just 12 seconds. But it marked the beginning of man’s conquest of the air. The announcement last month from Mr. Wright that his plane was on the way to England to be placed in the Science Museum at South Kensington, London, caused little surprise. It simply meant that he had not changed his mind on the statement he made in 1925 that since the Smithsonian Institution had labeled the flying machine of the late Prof. Samuel P. Langley as the first to fly, he would take his elsewhere.”
Brooklyn Boro
View MoreNew York City’s most populous borough, Brooklyn, is home to nearly 2.6 million residents. If Brooklyn were an independent city it would be the fourth largest city in the United States. While Brooklyn has become the epitome of ‘cool and hip’ in recent years, for those that were born here, raised families here and improved communities over the years, Brooklyn has never been ‘uncool’.